One of the big hypes of Windows 7 was the new integrated touch and multitouch features unheard of in previous systems. On paper, it all looks nice, but the folks over at Engadget recently tested out these said features of the beta on an HP TouchSmart PC, and were underwhelmed by the efficiency of the features.

Touchscreens have always been a gimmick promoted by people that have an irrational fear of the keyboard. It always looks slick in demos, and for a handful of applications where single keypresses are all you need (cash registers) or for controlling a presentation it does have it's used - but frankly for normal computer use it provides little in the way of improvement. Touch is usually innaccurate, horsepower hungry, and relies on overcomplicated easily broken sensors that have relegated touchscreen to niche markets instead of widespread deployment.

I agree. In my early years I worked at a fast food chain with touch screens. They were slow, unreliable, crash prone - quite frankly they would have been better off getting those silicon water and food resistant keyboards and using those instead.

Multitouch doesn't bring anything REALLY new to the table in that regard. It's another "gee ain't it neat!" technology that you'll hear trumpeted from rooftops as revolutionary...

... and stay in the shadows as an also ran, because nobody asked the question:

"What good is it?" Ooh look you can move something around and rotate it... Until someone comes up with a killer application for it, it's cutesy unnecessary bull that's all flash, and no substance.

AAAH, that felt good. I've not posted like that in a while.

To me multi-touch has all the usefulness of those awful 'face place' replacement packs that HP used to include with their desktop computers - so 'users' could 'customise' their computers for their 'personality'.

I can't think of a single time when I've actually heard a normally end user go, "gee, I'd really love to have a touch screen computer". Most of the time I hear end users more likely to say, "I wish the damn computer stopped giving me errors that don't tell me what I am doing wrong!" and many other complaints.

Touch screens to me sounds like to me as the bottom of the barrel, we've run out of ideas, last resort, 'cup holder' addition to the computing world.